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Title: Dark Operator
Series: Galaxy's Edge: Dark Operator #1
Author: Doc Spears
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Mil-SF
Pages: 355
Words: 130K

Synopsis:

From Galaxysedge.fandom.com & Me

Legion Dark Ops has always been a unit shrouded in secrecy.

Tasked with performing covert missions, its kill teams are filled with the best warriors from within the ranks of the Legion.

Kel Turner is one of the youngest legionnaires ever to be selected to its ranks. After many battles and trials, he is faced with the greatest challenge of his life - operating by himself on a remote planet at the galaxy's edge, a foot soldier for the policies of the duplicitous House of Reason, tasked with solving a crisis that would take ten kill teams to resolve.

Diplomats, spies, shadowy terrorist groups, and an enigmatic general work with and against Kel as he fights to save a society from itself. What can one operator do alone, separated from his kill team, fighting a war that has no name?

Once Kel has turned around the various police forces of the planet and done a lot of good work, he's asked to leave. Immediately. By the very man he thought was his friend on the planet, the titular head of security for the Families.

Once he reaches Republic Space, he finds out that that same man used the skills Kel gave him and his men to overthrow the Families and establish himself as Dictator. And all of this was known about and used by the politicians of the Republic.

My Thoughts:

This was MUCH better than the Order of the Centurion sub-series (which I dnf'd partway through). While still not engaging in a tone of space opera that the original series does, this managed to be a thoroughly enjoyable military SF romp. Part of my enjoyment, and focused me on what I didn't enjoy about Order, was that Kel is a pretty well rounded guy. I guess my problem with Order was that I was reading about guys who were breaking apart in some way or other, and the testing that Tyrus Rechs set up for even getting into the Legion should have weeded out fellows like that. Here, Kel is everything I expect to read about when reading about the Dark Operators, the top of the top of the Legion.

He's young, not stupid, but naive in terms of just how the galaxy works in certain ways. It takes him by surprise when the Security Chief takes over using a coup. He's really surprised when his best friend is killed by the Zhee and he finds out that the head of the Dark Operators helped train Zhee back in the day. He's a great mix of deadly, competent and naive.

The story was good too. Kell is on a world that is experiencing some civil unrest and is helping the security forces get a handle on things. As such there is a lot of military action but it is liberally leavened with social things like going out to eat or going to a party. For me, it was perfectly balanced between straight up Mil-SF and good old fashioned adventure.

I'm looking forward to the next one. And once I'm done with this 5book sub-series, I'll have to see what kind of back catalog Doc Spears has of his own original stuff.

★★★✬☆ ( )

Dark Operator, the first book in the five book series by John “Doc” Spears, Jason Anspach, and Nick Cole is the most thrilling example of careful planning, diligent preparation, and conscientious execution that I have ever read. And yes, I’m totally serious about that.

Doc Spears has a remarkable biography. Green Beret. Osteopath. And now writer. Special Forces or surgeon would constitute a complete career for most people, so doing both stands out in my view. That background also gives this book a remarkable depth, it is packed full of the distilled experience of a man who has been there and done that.

As the title and the cover might suggest, you will get operators doing operator things: killing people and breaking stuff in spectacular fashion. However, you also get something that is far more interesting in my opinion: the hard work and preparation that makes for true excellence.

In the main Galaxy’s Edge series, we get to see kill teams in action, but it is here that we see some of the process of recruiting, training, and team building that makes the kill teams what they are. And once the protagonist, Kel Turner, gets selected for a solo mission, then we get to see that being in Special Forces means much more than being a crack shot. Kel spends most of his time in the book observing, advising, and training others. As talented as he is, his true value is in his knowledge and experience being shared with those who need it.

While I do not know first hand the ways elite operators, I do know the thrill of being on a small team of highly experienced professionals with a high degree of autonomy and trust. You can get some remarkable things done that way in many avenues of life, and I feel that the dynamics of such a team are captured well in Dark Operator.

That solo mission is to the world of Meridian, a planet settled by Greeks that maintained their ancestral language and traditions partly by long isolation from the rest of the galaxy. Kel’s mission is to advise and assist the rulers of the planet with political unrest that is threatening to spiral out of control. The government of Meridian is undemocratic and repressive, but useful to the powerful, so the regime is secretly propped up by the quietly competent servants of empire, men like Kel. The setup mirrors the political situation of Greece in the 1970s, when it was ruled by a junta, but also a key Cold War ally of the United States and part of NATO.

Kel’s experiences on Meridian are so well portrayed that I would have found it plausible that this book is a thinly fictionalized memoir of Spears’ time there when he was a Green Beret, except that the dates don’t match up, not to mention that would have been the wrong part of the world for the units he served in. It just seemed real, which is a testament to the skill of the authors.

Another element that adds to my impression of realism is Kel’s uneasy relationship with his erstwhile allies in Republic intelligence. Soldiers are often straightforward and unsubtle men, motivated by duty, while spies have a tendency toward moral flexibility and find duplicity as natural as breathing. While on Meridian, Kel stumbles upon the kind of shady cover operation that the United States intelligence agencies were notorious for running during the Cold War. Compartmentalization and operational security work just as well at shielding you from the attention of your own government as your opponent.

Kel’s intense discomfort with the moral ambiguity of his mission and his own role in bringing about the political machinations that occur on Meridian war with his pride for a job well done and his sense of duty. There is at least a hint that perhaps Kel’s work on Meridian served the greater good, but in his world as in ours, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and only at the end of days shall accounts truly be settled.

I very much enjoyed this book, and I look forward to seeing what other trouble Kel Turner finds himself in.

I purchased Dark Operator myself, no review copy was provided by the authors. ( )